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Culture antj 3&eltgtou 






INNER CIRCLE SERIES 


Culture anti ^eltgtou 


BY 

ALBERTUS A. PFANSTIEHL 

AUTHOR OF “HOME LIFE,” “JUST ACROSS THE 
THRESHOLD,” ETC. 


“Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his 
way ? 

By taking heed thereto according to thy word.” 
—Psalms 119-9. 


The Winona Publishing Company 

Chicago, Ill. Winona Lake, Ind. 


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LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

JUN 15 1904 


Copyright Entry 



COPYRIGHT, 1904 
BY 

THE WINONA PUBLISHING COMPANY' 










TO THE MEMBERS OF THE GRADU¬ 
ATING CLASS OF 1904 

OF THE 

jportfjtoment Solitary #cat>nn£ 

AT 

HIGHLAND PARK, ILLINOIS 

FOR WHOM THIS BACCALAUREATE SERMON 
WAS PREPARED, 

THIS BOOK IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED 
WITH HAPPY MEMORIES OF PLEASANT ASSO¬ 
CIATIONS WITH THEM 
AS CHAPLAIN OF THE INSTITUTION 
WHICH SENDS THEM FORTH 
WITH THE HOPE THAT THE DISCIPLINE AND 
TRAINING IN MIND AND BODY THEY 
HAVE RECEIVED IN IT 
MAY ALWAYS BE TO THEM AN INCENTIVE TO 
DO NOBLE SERVICE IN THE BETTERMENT 


OF THE WORLD, 


Text: Proverbs 9:1-6: “Wisdom hath 
builded her house, she hath hewn out her 
seven pillars; she hath killed her beasts; 
she hath mingled her wine; she hath also 
furnished her table. She hath sent forth 
her maidens, she crieth upon the highest 
places of the city, Whoso is simple, let him 
turn in hither: as for him that is void of 
understanding, she saith to him , Come, 
eat ye of my bread, and drink of the ivine I 
have mingled. Leave off , ye simple ones, 
and live; and walk in the way of under¬ 
standing 


6 


1 


Culture and Religion 


A call to all to seek the highest 
attainment in human life; a call par¬ 
ticularly appropriate to be heeded by 
those who have already felt the thrill 
of strength and the exhilaration of 
spirit there come to a man who eats 
of the bread and drinks of the wine 
which refresh mind and soul. And in 
casting about for a suitable theme, as 
my message this morning, particularly 
to this graduating class of young men, 
I thought I could be of no more prac¬ 
tical use than to bring from the field 
of active life some truths that have 
impressed themselves upon me in the 
midst of every-day duties, truths that 
will be of value to those at least of the 
audience who are now preparing for 
life’s work. It was Lord Beaconsfield 
who said that one of the fundamental 
conditions of success in life is knowing 
the needs of one’s age or epoch. 

7 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


We come to think about a subject 
that has practical bearing upon one of 
the most important issues of the age, 
viz., 

CULTURE AND RELIGION 

The theme in itself is not new; yet 
in our day certain phases of it ought 
to be discussed that have peculiar 
interest and bearing upon questions of 
practical importance which this and 
the coming generations cannot ignore 
without jeopardizing interests of para¬ 
mount gravity. It may be added that 
it is upon our educational institutions 
that the satisfactory answer to these 
questions depends, especially such in¬ 
stitutions as are established not only 
for the advancement of culture, but 
culture plus that which gives it its 
permanent value; having in mind the 
emphasizing of that element in cul¬ 
ture which gives it this value, viz., re¬ 
ligion. 


8 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


Know we not that the tendency is 
towards secularization of all things, 
the church, the school, the home—a 
tendency that comes from the notion 
that “universities and all other places 
of education exist for one purpose 
only: to train men for their special 
crafts or trades. If they do this 
well, they are useful; if they do not, 
they are good for nothing.” Surely 
this is a very narrow view of their 
mission, a view that forgets that 
after all “the man is more than his 
trade.” 

Now, an institution that recognizes 
religion as well as, if not even more 
than, culture; or perhaps better, that 
knows of no culture apart from relig¬ 
ion, and no religion apart from cul¬ 
ture, has a most beneficent influence 
and a most important mission in this 
age when things are measured so uni¬ 
versally by material standards. Mrs. 
Browning well wrote: 

9 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


“Everywhere 

We’re too materialistic—eating clay, 

. . . clay by handfuls, clay by lumps, 

Until we’re filled up to the throat with 
clay; 

And grow the grimy color of the ground 
On which we are feeding. Ay, Materialist 
The age’s name is. God himself with some 
Is apprehended as the bare result 
Of what His hand materially has made. 

* ******* * 
There are many even 

Whose names are written in the Christian 
church 

To no dishonor, diet still on mud, 

And splash the altars with it.” 

The question with many, even when 
it comes to their schooling, is one of 
acquiring education enough only to 
“make a living,” forgetting that to 
make a living is one thing, to live is 
quite another. God’s object in cre¬ 
ating man with his superior endow¬ 
ments that enable him to appreciate 
high spiritual enjoyments, was not 
simply for him, like an earth-worm, 
10 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


to make a living—amassing a fortune, 
sweating, worrying, only for this— 
having this in view as an end rather 
than merely as a means to a higher 
end. And that school, academy, uni¬ 
versity or college utterly fails that has 
not for its object the development of 
such a culture as will put man in touch 
and line with the high, holy purpose of 
God, causing him fully to appreciate, 
that after all security and permanency 
in human life and human institutions 
depends upon what we are morally and 
spiritually, rather than upon what we 
have. Professor Sumner, of Yale, 
wrote: “The welfare of society is 
found to be rooted in moral forces. 
. . . It comes to this: the question 
how well off we can he depends at last 
on the question how rational, how 
virtuous and enlightened we are.” 
Massiveness of character, rather than 
massiveness of brick and stone and 
mortar and gold, determines the des- 
11 


L of C. 





CULTURE AND RELIGION 


tiny of people and nations. Divorce 
religion from culture and you divorce 
from it the element in all endeavors to 
make progress in material riches that 
will after all insure the perpetuity of 
our institutions, political, social, mer¬ 
cantile, educational, and religious. 
What in the formative period of our 
country stamped the coin of character 
upon our institutions that gives such 
strength and such elasticity and such 
glory to our nation as we prove to 
have? Was it the wealth of our fore¬ 
fathers in money and material re¬ 
sources? No. A millionaire was not 
known among them. Whence comes 
it that, as Eggleston has said in 
“ Roxy ,” the Puritan preachers, the 
brave cobblers and tinkers whom the 
seventeenth century stuck in the stocks 
and prison-houses, and the fervent 
Wesleyan village blacksmiths and 
Yorkshire farmers of the eighteenth 
century are yet masters of the nine- 
12 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


teenth? The personalities of these 
Puritans are projected with tremen¬ 
dous force even into this twentieth 
century, being in many respects still 
the determining forces in religion and 
in the state. How comes this? What 
sought they? Merely culture? They 
believed in culture: witness the school 
and college in the same yard with the 
church. But it was culture plus the 
development of divine ideas; ay, more, 
the appropriating and making part of 
the very being these divine ideas. In 
the educational order of our early his¬ 
tory the preacher and the teacher were 
substantially one; the pulpit and the 
professor’s chair had this in common: 
the development of character and 
manhood as the basis of fitness for 
life; the discipline of all the human 
faculties, mental and moral, in uni¬ 
son. Even Matthew Arnold, the 
apostle of literary or aesthetic culture, 
said, speaking to and of Americans, 
13 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


that the discipline of Puritanism has 
been invaluable to us, and “the more,” 
said he, “I read history, the more I 
see of mankind, the more I recognize 
its value.” Whittier wrote, in Dr. 
Cuyler’s autograph-hook, concerning 
our country: 

“She heeds no skeptic’s puny hands, 

While near the school the churchyard 
stands; 

Nor fears the bigot’s blinded rule, 

While near the church-spire stands the 
school.” 

That is the truest culture that 
makes a man rich in principle, rich in 
moral character, wealthy in the pos¬ 
session of divine ideas to shape all 
thought and work and prayer. This 
age of ours, in spite of its material 
development and its progress in the 
arts and sciences—nay, because of 
these—can do nothing more profitable 
than to pay strictest attention to offer¬ 
ing the youth opportunities to develop 
14 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


in the line of such culture—a culture 
permeated with religious conscious¬ 
ness. Do you ask why? Let Bunson 
answer: “Culture without religious 
consciousness is nothing but civilized 
barbarism and disguised animalism.” 
Because, further, in the words of Dr. 
John Lord, “the grandest civilization 
in its material aspects may coexist with 
the utmost debasement of morals, as 
seen among the Greeks and Romans 
and in the wicked capitals of modern 
Europe.” And let it not be forgotten 
that with the debasement of morals 
goes the speedy and inevitable down¬ 
fall of nations. 

Amid the remarkable progress that 
we are making in this age of science 
and invention, and of multiplied 
schools and colleges and universities, 
what is there of more importance than 
the question of the moral and religious 
element in their instruction? A few 
years ago the great Gladstone wrote an 
15 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


article in the Contemporary Review in 
which he deliberately penned these 
lines: “To uphold the integrity of the 
Christian dogma, to trace its work¬ 
ings, and to exhibit its adaptations to 
human thought and human welfare in 
all the varying experiences of the ages, 
is, in my view, perhaps the noblest of 
all tasks which it is given to the human 
mind to pursue. This is the guardian¬ 
ship of the great fountain of human 
hope, happiness and virtue.” 

Human hope, human happiness, 
human virtue!—a trinity, the destruc¬ 
tion of which from among any people 
or nation is woeful in the extreme. 
Shall our institutions of learning 
neglect the training of our youth in 
this guardianship? And do human 
hope, happiness and virtue not need 
guardianship in our day? Is the 
seething, boiling, restless condition 
of the “masses,” so-called, moving 
and emigrating w T here they can, 
16 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


grumbling discontentedly where they 
are forced to stay and suffer and toil, 
inspiring to hopefulness? Can there 
amid hopelessness be much happiness? 

Shall a man be branded as a croak¬ 
ing pessimist when he looks at things 
as they are? Is a prophet a true 
prophet when he cries peace, peace, 
whether there be peace or not? Is he 
a safe guardian of life and property 
who simply caps Vesuvius, whose 
rumbling in the crater will sooner or 
later belch forth destructive lava? 
Tell me not, then, that I must not, in 
addressing an audience such as this, 
an audience where a large number of 
persons are present to whom in a 
special sense will be committed the 
grave and important trusts as educated 
men and women, say that there is need 
of any special guardianship of hope, 
happiness and virtue in our country. 
If not, what mean the 4 ‘unholy laws 
and customs of divorce which have 
17 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


been in late years growing like a con¬ 
stitutional cancer through all our 
social fabric?” What is the signifi¬ 
cance of the “rapidly increasing, 
almost universal desecration of our 
ancestral Sabbath?” Is there no 
meaning to the corruptions in trade 
which “loosen the bands of faith and 
transform the halls of the honest 
trader into the gambler’s den?” I ask, 
what means it that we are all in dan¬ 
ger, the family, the school, the church 
—all civilization and religion alike— 
of being swallowed up in the wild, un¬ 
governable deluge of the mighty con¬ 
flict between capital and labor, and of 
the “mad, nihilistic, anarchical rav¬ 
ings?” Oh, the despairing wail of the 
poor laborer! and the nervous unrest 
of the capitalist lest at any moment a 
firebrand be placed to his factories, or 
a pistol be held to his head! Where 
is the guardianship of hope, happiness 
and virtue amid these existing circum- 
18 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


stances? Surely not in material pros¬ 
perity only, nor is it in legislation 
alone, neither in advancement of art, 
science, philosophy; in other words, 
in culture alone. True civilization 
and human welfare depend upon more 
than that. Gross superstition can 
easily obscure the intellect, and in¬ 
famous vices undermine the moral 
health of nations and communities. 

What, then, is the saving element in 
all true civilization? I make bold to 
say it is the Christian religion, the 
possession of divine ideals and ideas 
wrought into the very fiber of our 
souls; that discipline which alone will 
develop character in the citizen, which 
alone keeps laws inviolate and saves 
them from being mere dead letters 
upon our statute books. Governor 
Hatch of Michigan said: “I tell you 
that the power of the Christian relig¬ 
ion in our State Prison does more than 
all the discipline we can get there.” 

19 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


And this is equally true of us as a na¬ 
tion; the power of the Christian relig¬ 
ion will do more than all the discipline 
of arms, or of police force, or of laws 
combined, to preserve hope, happiness 
and virtue. Laplace said: “I have 
lived long enough to know what I did 
not at one time believe, that no society 
can be upheld in happiness and honor 
without the sentiment of religion.” 
And yet the various schools of culture 
raise their voices in rivalry to religion. 
Humanism , of which Frederic Harri¬ 
son is the modern apostle and prophet, 
cries aloud for a hearing. Scientific 
culture, too, as championed by Huxley, 
raises its voice, promising to help men 
out of their fallen condition by the 
acquisition of scientific knowledge— 
learning the laws of nature and so 
knowing them that we will not run 
counter to them, and thus reach the 
ultima thule of existence! But it is 
not the intellect alone that is fallen; 

20 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


the whole man is in spiritual dark¬ 
ness, and scientific knowledge is not 
the lever which will lift him above the 
sinful impulses of his heart, and place 
him upon the bedrock of moral recti¬ 
tude and spiritual salvation. Dr. 
Bushnell has well written: “Grazing 
in the fields of nature is not enough 
for a being whose affinities lay hold of 
the supernatural and reach after God. 
Airy and beautiful the field may be, 
shown by so great a master; full of 
goodly prospects and fascinating 
images; but without a living God and 
objects of faith and terms of duty it is 
a pasture only, nothing more!” Then 
we have aesthetic culture, of which 
Matthew Arnold is the great teacher, 
assigning to religion a , not the , prom¬ 
inent part in developing man to “the 
perfection of our human nature on all 
its sides, in all its capacities.” He 
says we are to develop aesthetic cul¬ 
ture for this end. Well, but what 
21 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


type of culture? To that of Rome 
and Greece? Surely not there. 
“The fact must be emphasized,” says 
a German lecturer, “that the Greek 
and Roman popular minds were not in 
a condition to produce an abiding 
culture; nay, at the very heights of 
their cultures internal decomposition 
announced certain death, which 
thoughtful historians, like Thucydides 
and Livy, by no means concealed from 
themselves and their contemporaries. 

. . . Even the bloom of the ancient 
culture we behold affected with un¬ 
culture, nay, even with barbarism. It 
is, on the whole, only a commence¬ 
ment of culture, or better, a beautiful 
and noble attempt towards culture.” 

To speak, then, of culture alone as 
being the source of the cure of social 
ills is to talk nonsense. It proved 
impotent among the ancient people, 
whom God enabled to reach its high¬ 
est possible human point. Surely, 
22 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


then, for Matthew Arnold and his 
school, who, as they walk among the 
low, degraded populace of London, 
steeped in vice and immorality, to 
propose to raise up these fallen ones 
by causing them to study the “beauti¬ 
ful,” the “sweet,” the “perfect,” and 
assign to religion but a secondary place 
in the endeavor to raise them, is utter 
folly. Imagine the degraded popu¬ 
lace of London, 

“Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal 
Green,” 

starving for want of bread, freezing 
for want of clothes, drunken in the 
gutter, reading—supposing that they 
can read — poetry, studying the 
“sweet,” the “perfect,” the “beauti¬ 
ful,” and this to transform them from 
beings, some of them but little higher 
than the devils in hell, to beings but 
little lower than the angels in heaven! 
What mockery of human hearts, what 
treachery is this! 


23 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


Nay, let us face the question 
squarely; for what we have been con¬ 
sidering is not of theoretical import; 
does not belong to the technicalities 
of the schools and theology, but is of 
most practical concern. JFor we are 
everywhere called upon to face ques¬ 
tions of reform. And how can there 
be true reformation without first a 
transformation? Religion is not a 
reformation, but a transformation; a 
regeneration, if you please. No 
schooling that ignores religion ever 
does affect character, however much it 
may equip the mind. Stifle the voice 
of religion while going in quest of 
intellectual equipment for life’s serv¬ 
ices ! This reminds us of one of 
Southey’s poems in which he tells of 
a bell that had been suspended on a 
rock, that the sound given as the 
waves beat upon it might warn the 
mariner of the propinquity of danger. 
Pirates cut the rope, because of the 
24 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


warning it gave, in order to enrich 
themselves with the plunder of the 
wrecks. It so happened, however, 
that at a future period these very 
pirates struck that rock which they 
had stripped of its means of admonish¬ 
ing them. God save our American 
colleges from the suicidal folly of cut¬ 
ting the rope of the bell that in them 
is the only warning, guiding sound 
amid the rocks on their intellectual 
voyage, striking which, many a soul 
has made eternal shipwreck. 

Consider some of these rocks against 
which religion diligently warns: 

I. One of these is intellectual 
haughtiness. 

It was Principal Shairp who said: 
“College learning is good, but not all 
the learning of all the universities of 
Europe can compensate for the loss of 
that which the youth reared in a relig¬ 
ious home has learned in childhood at 
his mother’s knee.” And again: 

25 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


“We should try, as we grow up into 
manhood and get to know the world, 
to have this simplicity of childhood 
kept fresh within us, still at the cen¬ 
ter. If we allow the world to rob us 
of it, as so many do, in boyhood even 
before manhood begins, we may be 
sure that the world has nothing equal 
to it to give us instead. And they 
who may for a time have lost it or had 
it obscured or put into abeyance by 
contact with men, cannot too soon 
seek to have it restored within them. 
And the only way to preserve this 
good thing, or have it, if lost, re¬ 
newed, is to open the heart to simple, 
truthful communion with God and 
Christ, and try to bring the heart 
closer and closer to Him.” 

There is nothing on earth more 
unbecoming than intellectual haughti¬ 
ness, which makes a man impractical 
and useless, while at the same time 
there is nothing more insidious in stu- 
26 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


dent life than temptation to this. 
Comte wrote to his daughter that 
there are two moral evils which pecu¬ 
liarly wait on knowledge: it puffs up 
and it dries the heart by giving free 
scope to pride, and by turning it from 
love. 

Pride is always a precursor to use¬ 
lessness and a forerunner to mental 
stagnation. 

‘‘Could’st thou in vision see 
Thyself the man God meant, 

Thou never more would’st be 
The man thou art—content.” 

The most useful, the best and great¬ 
est men are those who carry a child’s 
heart within the man’s bosom. Glad¬ 
stone never manifested his true great¬ 
ness more effectively than when in an 
inquiry-room, as the Rev. Theodore 
Cuyler says he saw him do, he kneels 
beside a common chimney-sweep to 
pray with him for his soul’s salvation. 
Hamilton has written: “The highest 
27 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


reach of human science is the scientific 
recognition of human ignorance. . . . 
The grand result of human wisdom is 
thus only a consciousness that what 
we know is as nothing to what we 
know not.” “The source of Christ’s 
greatness,” says Ulman, “is not His 
ascending, hut His condescending, not 
rising above men, hut letting Himself 
down to them.” 

What, after all, is human greatness? 
Caesar is stabbed when he has con¬ 
quered Rome. Diocletian retires in 
disgust from the government of an 
empire. Godfrey languishes in grief 
when he has taken Jerusalem. Charles 
V of Spain shuts himself up in a con¬ 
vent. “Galileo, whose spirit has 
roamed the heavens, is a prisoner of 
the inquisition. Napoleon masters a 
continent and expires, an exile, on a 
rock in the ocean. Mirabeau dies of 
despair when he has kindled the torch 
of revolution. The poetic soul of 
28 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


Burns passes away in poverty and 
moral eclipse. Madness overtakes the 
cool satirist, Swift; and mental de¬ 
generacy is the final condition of the 
fertile-minded Scott. The high-souled 
Hamilton perishes in a petty quarrel; 
and curses overwhelm Webster in the 
halls of his early triumphs.” Lincoln 
and Garfield and McKinley, after 
nobly filling the highest place the 
suffrages of their fellow citizens could 
give them, perished at the hands of 
assassins. John Baptist is beheaded 
at the whim of a wicked woman. 
Jesus is crucified by a furious mob! 
Such is the end of human greatness! 
Happy he who, in the spirit of Him 
who, greatest among the great, was 
yet the humblest among the humble, 
considers his greatness in direct pro¬ 
portion to the sacrifice he makes of 
himself in serving his fellowmen. 
Mastery means service. He that 
would be greatest in the kingdom of 
29 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


the world, and of God, must become as 
a little child. 

2. A second rock against which re¬ 
ligion warns is the tendency to become 
too speculative and critical. Such an 
one loses enthusiasm. Goethe, in 
Faust , has Mephistopheles say: 

“Ich sag ’es dir; ein Kerl der speculiert 
1st wie ein Thier, auf diirrer Heide 
Von einem bosen Geist im Kreis gefiihrt, 
Und rings umher ligt schone, grune 
weide.” 

Just here the present age is in great 
danger. We are in a distinctively 
transition period. “It is a busy, rest¬ 
less time, eager to cast off the old, and 
reach forward to the new.” Amid 
this it becomes our educational insti¬ 
tutions to hold to the reality of things 


* “I tell you this: a man who speculates 
is like a beast, led in circles by an evil 
spirit over barren heaths, when all around 
him lie beautiful green fields.” 

30 





CULTURE AND RELIGION 


that have been tried and have not 
been found wanting. Partaking of 
this restlessness and desirous of fol¬ 
lowing the fashions, standards of 
criticism have become sadly affected. 
The desire is to fall in line with the 
latest fad. Literature in many cases 
is judged in a spirit of favoritism, rather 
than from a sincere, honest apprecia¬ 
tion of true merit. Criticism and 
speculation are rife as people are taking 
political, social and theological horo¬ 
scopes of the future. Old landmarks 
are being removed, and as Shairp says, 
two opposite results may arise from 
this: it may bring God nearer to the 
souls of men, or it may remove Him 
to greater distance and make life more 
completely secular. 

What is it amid this prevalent con¬ 
fusion that will save the soul from 
drifting and keep it fast to reality? 
Christian faith. As Whittier has 
written: 


31 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


“Nothing before, nothing behind, 

The steps of Faith 
Fall on the seeming void and find 
The rocks beneath.” 

“Even refined intellectuality cannot 
much help us here. That which 
passes safely through all changes is 
the tender conscience, the trusting 
heart, the devout mind.” If there is 
any one thing more than another the 
student of to-day needs carefully to 
watch, it is that the tendency to specu¬ 
late and criticise shall not absorb his 
whole being. There is danger in this. 
Keep the avenues of communion with 
God in childlike trust wide open. Let 
nothing obstruct them. Then go out 
upon the stormy intellectual sea and 
you will not go without ballast, with¬ 
out compass, without rudder, without 
anchor; for without religion “reason 
has no guide, imagination no object, 
sensibility no depth, and virtue itself 
no charms.” Keep ever in touch with 
32 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


the spiritual, which is the real, the 
true, the eternal. A wise word was 
written when these lines were penned: 
“If one is ever to get beyond the mere 
outer precinct and pass within the 
holy place, he must put otf his critical 
apparatus, and enter as a simple, 
contrite-hearted man. Not as men of 
science, not as critics, but as little 
children shall we enter into the king¬ 
dom of heaven.” 

3. A third rock against which relig¬ 
ion warns the student, if he will take 
her into his heart, is the danger of 
having low ideals, at least not the 
highest. Culturists, ’tis true, look to 
the perfection of human nature in all 
its parts, but yet, ’tis only as human 
nature. Their eye is not fixed beyond. 
And yet man has also a divine side to 
his nature. No culture that ignores 
the development of the Godward capa¬ 
cities ever reaches out after the true 
ideals. Culture, to be high and worthy 
33 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


and truly inspiring to the worthiest 
deeds in life, must be connected with, 
at least join heart and hand with, re¬ 
ligion. For it will then strive to attain 
not only to human thought, human 
effort, human self-development, hut it 
will cause man, with his deepest 
affinities, to lay hold of the supernat¬ 
ural and reach out after the infinities, 
after God; and thus only will the rest¬ 
less soul find rest, the troubled heart 
find peace; for, in the oft-repeated 
words of Augustine, the soul of man 
finds no rest until it rests in God. 
The aim of our educational institu¬ 
tions, if they desire to serve their 
country and to bless the generations, 
should be as much, if not more, the 
development of moral as of intellectual 
character. “The interests of society 
are not secured in a system which turns 
out brains minus a conscience. ” It is 
more important to train youth into 
true manhood than simply into learned 
34 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


scholars. For, if true manhood forms 
a people’s characteristics, you have a 
country secure, blessed, enduring, 
powerful, free. 

Young gentlemen of the graduating 
class of 1904: In bringing you our 
hearty congratulations on this one of 
the happiest and most important 
occasions in your lives, I will only add 
to what has already been said, that, as 
you go out into your future with the 
mental and bodily equipment you 
have here received, there is one thing 
in all your life it is well to remember: 
you have a body, you have a mind, but 
you are a soul; and what we are im¬ 
ports us more than what we have. 
“Having is using,” some one has well 
said. “Anything not used is already 
the same as lost.” Use your body, 
do not abuse it; use it so that you 
may grow into healthy, stalwart men, 
whose strength of body will greatly 
facilitate the best use of the mind. 

35 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


Use your mind in things that make for 
purity, truth, righteousness, integ¬ 
rity, and this will help you in keeping 
the life blood coursing healthily 
through your veins; then will you be 
a soul into whose development nature 
and grace will pour out of their rich 
storehouse all that will make for a true 
destiny. 

“Let not the body dull the soul: 

Its weakness, fears, and sloth despise. 

Man toils and roams from pole to pole 
To gain some fleeting earthly prize; 

The higher good he little cares 

To win, or striving, soon despairs. 

Press on.” 

As my last word to you, I want once 
more to hold up the cross of Jesns 
Christ, and bring this message: In 
Him find ideal manhood. He came to 
bring true life to light. Look unto 
Him not merely to get a living, but to 
live. Voicing the mind and heart of 
faculty and friends here, I say in the 
36 




CULTURE AND RELIGION 


words of the venerable Dr. Hitchcock: 
“Dictate no terms to Providence. 
At whatever cost, accept the service 
offered you, high or low, far or near. 
Then burn to the socket.” And now, 
my dear young friends, fare ye well. 
May God’s choicest benediction rest 
upon you evermore, and may the bless¬ 
ing of Almighty God, the Father, Son 
and Holy Spirit, be yours for time and 
eternity. Amen. 


37 


















































































JUN 15 1904 




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